The real first farmers: How agriculture was a global invention

Agriculture was independently invented at least 11 times on four continents – not just in the Middle East. It's time to rethink how modern civilisation took root

By Bob Holmes

IN FEBRUARY 1910, British botanist Lilian Gibbs walked across North Borneo and climbed Mount Kinabalu, a lone white woman among 400 locals. She later wrote: “The ‘untrodden jungle’ of fiction seems to be non-existent in this country. Everywhere the forest is well worked and has been so for generations.”

What Gibbs saw was a seemingly curated tropical forest, regularly set alight by local tribes and with space carefully cleared around selected wild fruit trees, to give them room to flourish. The forest appeared to be partitioned and managed to get the most rattan canes, fibre for basketry, medicinal plants and other products. Generation after generation of people had cared for the trees, gradually shaping the forest they lived in. This wasn’t agriculture in the way we know it today but a more ancient form of cultivation, stretching back more than 10,000 years. Half a world away from the Fertile Crescent, Gibbs was witnessing a living relic of the earliest days of human farming.

In recent years, archaeologists have found signs of this “proto-farming” on nearly every continent, transforming our picture of the dawn of agriculture. Gone is the simple story of a sudden revolution in what is now the Middle East with benefits so great that it rapidly spread around the world. It turns out farming was invented many times, in many places and was rarely an instant success. In short, there was no agricultural revolution. “We’re going to have to start thinking about things in a different way,” says Tim Denham, an archaeologist at the Australian National University in Canberra.

Farming is seen as a pivotal invention in ...

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